Conventionally, chemotherapy, that is, therapy by using anticancer drugs has been conducted as one of therapies for cancer patients. The anticancer drug treatment is a treatment method that is extremely useful for prevention of cancer progress or cancer recurrence, but is accompanied by risks due to side effects.
The anticancer drug is also known to differ in effectiveness from one patient to another. While some patients must take risks due to side effects, there are many patients who can, depending on the anticancer drug, not obtain a sufficient anticancer effect. To solve this problem, an approach for providing the maximum anticancer drug treatment by predicting an effect of an anticancer drug in a cancer patient (the sensitivity of the patient to the anticancer drug) while avoiding risks due to unnecessary side effects has been proposed.
For example, US 2007/0231837, US 2006/0173632 or US 2007/0003438 describes a method for judging sensitivity to a taxane-based anticancer drug on the basis of the activity value and expression level of a cyclin-dependent kinase (CDK).
The anticancer drug is known to differ in action on the living body depending on its type. For example, the taxane-based anticancer drug stabilizes intracellular microtubules in a polymerized state thereby suspending cellular mitosis to induce apoptosis. Peripheral neuritis is known as a major side effect of the taxane-based anticancer drug. An anthracycline-based anticancer drug, on the other hand, is known as an anticancer drug having an inhibitory action on topoisomerase. The anthracycline-based anticancer drug is a highly aggressive anticancer drug that directly destroys DNA, and causes severe side effects such as cardiac sarcolemma destruction and congestive heart failure. It follows that in treatment by using the anthracycline-based anticancer drug, it has been an important task to predict its usefulness in advance.
The present invention provides a novel method, being a nonconventional novel method, capable of highly accurately predicting an effect of treatment by using an anthracycline-based anticancer drug.